A clearer view

Melody Dye whispers with dialysis technician Dede Wise at the Renal Care Group. Dye receives treatment three times a week. She is losing her vision and is in need of a video magnifier.

Melody Dye enters the dialysis center at Renal Care Group Anchorage as though it's a party and she's the hostess.

"Hello, hello," she says to fellow patients as she arrives. She won't leave without a hearty "Did you have a good treatment? Good."

Depending on how you look at it, going for dialysis treatments three times a week can be either a trial or a blessing. Dye chooses to be optimistic.

"By giving me dialysis, God gave me a second try," she says.

Frankly, the four-hour treatments can be drudgery. Yet, when she enters the kidney center, Dye always makes an effort to smile.

"I feel if I come in all grumpy, I'm letting them down," she says.

The former human resources worker loved her job; leaving it was the hardest part of getting sick. Even when her vision deteriorated after complications from cataract surgery, Dye persevered, asking a computer technician to adjust her computer with larger type.

Now lacking a workplace, Dye treats her three times weekly dialysis as her job. Still, she longs to do more.

In addition to dialysis, Dye's diabetes has restricted her to a wheelchair and a knee-to-toe fiberglass foot brace on one leg. It also continues to steal her vision.

Dye can still see, though clarity is severely limited. Sometimes, she says, it's like looking through Vaseline-smeared glasses.

She has been telling herself her vision will come back, but that's a gamble. Already, she wears the most powerful prescription possible.

"I'm praying that it'll come back," she says.

Despite her outward cheerfulness, Dye says her vision loss depresses her. She misses two of her favorite hobbies, reading and crochet. And as a former payroll administrator who loves nothing more than working with numbers on ledgers, it frustrates her that she can't take care of the family's finances or balance a checkbook.

"It's very humbling when your daughter has to write checks for you," she says.

Longtime friend Laura O'Lacy nominated Dye for the Book of Dreams so she could receive a device that would allow her to read and do bookkeeping by super-magnifying type and handwork on a video screen.

"So much has happened to her," O'Lacy wrote. "She has always given so much to others and has asked for very little in return. This would make a major positive impact on her life."

Dye has offered to donate the video device to an appropriate local charity if or when she can no longer use it.

Melody Dye

B-2 Video magnifier, $2,290